


my heart’s a beginner

by Waypaststrange (moonbeatblues)



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Growing Up Together, M/M, and single mom steve harrington, coming soon: max teaching them how to skateboard, gonna write some quality max and dustin and lucas soon, it’s mike-narrated but it’s. everyone, lucas and dustin and el in: a funeral for dart, max and eleven in: how the fuck do you play D&D, mike is a bi icon, some hc some canon, will helping el not be scared of His Dog, will talking to mike after the snow ball
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-07
Updated: 2017-12-07
Packaged: 2019-02-11 14:06:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12936882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonbeatblues/pseuds/Waypaststrange
Summary: how the party grows before, during, and a little after everything comes to pass





	1. too much time (oh, oh, oh): i-v

**Author's Note:**

> (title from dry food by palehound)

i.

Will shakes when he goes- his eyes roll like big marbles and he digs his nails into his palms- and then he’s all still.  
You don’t like him being still- you’ve seen everyone but Dustin with their strings cut and their limbs loose, and you dream about them: Lucas crumpled like cloth on the sparse grass, El on the hallway floor, ashen and gathered up by the man with the grey hair, blood curving from her nose around her mouth and dried from ears to throat. Your dreams about Will are the worst- he’s just gone, spread like smoke, a tv-staticky jump and then nothing. The lights pulse with some deep, alien heartbeat and go quiet, and you wake up with your bones like wires, eyes darting in the darkness until you can bend yourself up and together.

You don’t even dream about the Demogorgon- you’d only seen it once, with its face spread like a flower, and then it was pinned to the board, and Eleven tore the two of them up like so much tissue paper. You don’t fear what it did to your friends; no, you fear what it made your friends do.  
  


ii.

You think you heard El on Christmas- it was a common feeling, to parse the static and press your ear into the receiver until it went red and quiet- but just after midnight with the lights from the yard soft and spattered on the blinds, the dial slipped from your hand to the left, and you could hear breathing. That deep-but-shallow kind she’d do when she was just about to use her powers, like she was summoning the fire in her throat. You were already half-asleep, mashed your eyes shut and cradled the walkie to your throat, but you remember the buzz and twist, like when El was siphoning Will’s voice from the Heathkit. The slow, deliberate shape of the words, like she’d been practicing in front of the mirror, like when she’d touch her face like she didn’t quite understand it, run her hands over her scalp like her hair was all cactus spines. (You wonder what her hair looks like now- you wonder if she knows what it would even look like all grown-out and down around her face. It makes you burn with this sickly sad-happiness, to think about El growing with the four of you, just. Somewhere else, for now. It makes your veins go all warm.)

“Merry Christmas, Mike.”  
  


iii.

You don’t like to think things are changing. You will the leaves to cling harder to the winter-stiff branches, refuse to turn your calendar past August, because each day is one day closer to that night, because your mom has never known what to say and she’ll try to fold her hands around yours and ask if you’re alright, and lies don’t stay down anymore, burn like bile.  
After Will’s birthday, after Dustin’s teeth start to come in like pearly, stalactite headstones, you go home with your fists balled and sulk in the basement, like the seasons pause if you’re not there to watch.  
You told Will all about her at first, the three of you all bursting over with emotion still too raw and hot to sort. Lucas speaks with the last traces of that scared reverence, casts you these deep looks, calls her brave and weird with equal fondness. Dustin has that big whistle-gap grin and is all motion, skipping from scalp to nose to wrist and miming various explosions, drawing up this nervous smile on Will’s pale face. You balk and twist your fingers all at once.

“She was...” Lackluster and snagging in your larynx somewhere, “great,” but Lucas and Dustin immediately chime in.  
“Yeah, great,” and “Really cool,” and warm hands on your shoulders.  
Things you don’t say: you still crowd up closer to your handlebars on your bike and riding still feels too light; you snap at Mom if she gets within two feet of El’s nest; you buried that yellow-yellow Benny’s shirt in a corner of your closet you won’t let yourself look at anymore.  
  


iv.

You know you feel it that day in the gym, that prickle of static in the air when El would lower her head and glare that hollow anger up through her eyelashes, feel like you’re hovering on some vacuum in your rib cage until Max goes crashing to the ground. The familiar shiver passes through you, a current through a long-dark circuit. It made you want to hold on when she did it, like holding hands and touching those big metal things at the science museum so you could feel the crack jump across you like a giant synapse. Like she’d pass the charge into you before she fell, fill you up with static.  
When you burst out into the hall, echo your frenetic energy with the slam of the doors, there’s nothing.  
But, as with the walkie when you hold it to your ear, you can feel her, like leaving indents in a paper even after erasing, shallow lines that belie where’s she’s been, what she’s written.  
Max wrings you with her eyes, that bright-angry California confusion, but you don’t move, not for a while.  
  


v.

Back when Ell was in the basement and you slept on pins and needles, you stole Nancy’s Walkman.  
Waited til it got real late, hearing your dad snoring-late, and stole yourself down the stairs, treading the sides of the steps close to the walls where they didn’t squeak so much and the carpet wasn’t worn flat and dull.

El balked when you made to put the headphones over her ears, with some lingering flash in her eyes of different hands, different instruments, but relaxed when you nodded.  
You don’t like a lot of Dad’s music, wrinkled your nose when he’d close the record needle with the reverence of a much more pious man and wait with his eyes big behind his glasses, all “What d’ya think, kiddo?” But there was one tape you didn’t mind so much.  
You dug through cassette after cassette to find it, traced the prism before you shut it in the Walkman. You knew it by heart, anticipated the look on El’s face when the heartbeats started, the voices, the tearing-paper white noise. Held up your hands for patience, truce.

“Just wait.”

And she did. You watched her eyes narrow and then widen and go glassy as the twang of Breathe slid into something smooth and ringing like a glass harmonica. She blinked fast fast fast, lower jaw worked just a little loose, twisted her fingers over the surface of the Walkman.

“Do you like it?”

Your voice gets thin and happy when you ask El things, like it only ever used to when you and Will were learning to play D&D, thumbing through the handbook fast enough for papercuts and filling up all the character sheets way too fast. It grates on your ears a little to hear it, makes you hate your esophagus for closing up when you need it the most, but El responds, slow and vague with all of her drawn up into her dark eyes, and it made Will smile all shaky, like he was nervous about being too happy.

“They’re called Pink Floyd. I don’t know what it means but even Nancy likes them, and her music all sucks.”

El did her little wait-wait-nod, like a waltz, how she always did when she only understood half of what you said and didn’t know how to ask. “It’s...pretty.”

 

You snuck the Walkman back into Nancy’s room in the morning, never had time to play anything else for El.  
You wonder if it was the only real music she’d ever heard, hoard the tape in your room after she’s gone, in the shrine of things too painful to use, scattered throughout the house.

When she comes back, you’ll play something else for her. You can use Will’s big speakers, put in some of Jonathan’s stuff, and her eyes will get all big again.  
Your voice can get thin like the winter branches and break like them and you won’t even care because it’ll be the only broken part of you by then.


	2. haunt me haunt me haunt me: vi

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> mike, feeling considerably celestial

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> was relistening to my eleven playlist and got into a big ol’ mood

vi.

El sears like a star does an empty sky, uninterrupted fission and fusion to shake the ground and vaporize the oceans, to rend to bone, to rest in heavy metal and ozone on your tongue, fire in your sinuses.

She’s always neon in your periphery—there are spores in your lungs from the tunnels and you’re shaking live and leery on the high of near-death, but she hits you like the first punch of a guitar through the amp, like a drop into water so cold it burns, chlorine and a bright green imprint behind your eyes.  
She sees you, and you shimmer like a soap bubble, like gasoline under the sun, even when Hopper wraps you up gruffly to stop you squealing and sending your pale fists into his midriff.  
She sees you, and she pinches your windpipe shut again when she goes.  
—

In a way you wish to see colors outside the visible spectrum, in the way you long for nameless, shapeless things, you wish you could have seen it.  
Seen her:  
-lifted off the floor with her own anger  
-bleeding from the nose and ears  
-red and bright and blinding  
-volcanic, _obsidian_

 

You’d understand— you know without knowing- how it felt to be suspended, to feel the fiberglass strands of the Upside Down closing over you, tamping you down dark and deep, dead and dying.  
—

The earth roars like an injured beast, like a demon expunged, and it goes through you like gamma radiation.  
You’ve had ragged, awful dreams of her tearing up like tissue paper under fluoresce and buzz, spasmodic giving to despondent, but they acquiesce.

You dream of old gods, the King Wurm beneath the soil, of a red so red your blood jumps to meet it, and you wake and heave up embers from your lungs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i would like to properly continue this, if there’s interest ?
> 
> @seafleece on tumblr, @quetzalcoatlmundi for writing


End file.
